Mixed Heritage | Mixed Culture | Mixed Identity | Mixed Parenting

American Identity

The country is slowly becoming more like a “rainbow,” according to a new book by Paul Taylor and Pew Research called “The Next America”.

Defining Mixed

These groups have many people of mixed heritage:
Latino, Black, Asian, Native American, and White

Latino

(Hispanic) people are mixed by definition. Hispanic has not been defined as a race, but this seems to be changing. Latin American countries have not had anti-miscegenation laws like the U.S. Most Latinos are part Amerindian mixed with some part(s) Spanish, Portuguese or Black.

Asian

people have been mixing with others in the U.S. since anti-miscegenation laws have been abolished, and also before anti-miscegenation laws were in place. After WWII there were more interracial Asian children in the U.S. due to both “war brides”, and a fear that being Asian and looking Asian can lead to discrimination and even internment.

“Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian.” – Dwanna L. Robertson

White

White people are often mixed with ‘5 shades of White’, or they are White Latino, or they are ‘One drop’ of color / ‘passing as White’, aka 1/16th or 1/32th of color. White is not counted as White when mixed with people of color, which accounts for the decline in White numbers over time. The other reason the numbers for White drop is because Europeans no longer immigrate to the U.S. at any where near the same rate of other groups. European countries tend to provide good universal health care and tend to have lower gun violence. Police do not routinely carry guns on their person in Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and India. In Norway officers carry arms in their cars but not on their person.

Other

Other people includes Native American (1%) and self identified Mixed people (5%).

Marrying Out

Intermarriage among people of different races is increasingly common. In 1980, just 7% of all marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity.In 2010, that share has doubled to 15% of all new marriages in the U.S. Hispanics (26%) and Asians (28%) were most likely to “marry out,” compared with 9% of whites and 17% of blacks. – Pew Research

If two people of mixed heritage marry, does Pew Research count that as marrying out / intermarriage?

(im)migration Policy

There is no Mixed American Life without pluralism. There is no pluralism without (im)migration.

The 1964 Civil Rights act, pushed by the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, influenced a change to U.S. immigration policy so that quotas are no longer based on race. This explains why the graph above shows population diversity quickly expand after 1964.

Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.

The Nation Origins Formula restricted immigration on the basis of existing proportions of U.S. population, severely restricting immigration of people who were not already represented in the current U.S. ethnic groups of the time.

Current U.S. immigration law favors the highly educated. U.S. immigration laws are now based on class instead of race. A problem with this is that class is often linked with race, and even more so now because U.S. immigration laws favor certain class groups, then those class groups become associated with certain professions, whether it be highly educated doctors and IT workers, or less educated agricultural workers and service industry workers.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed in 1943. Years later, U.S. culture finally considers Chinese food to be American food. You can tell because most every significant city in the U.S. has a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food is so popular with Americans as to now be considered American food, the way that Mexican and Italian food is also American food because you see these restaurants in so many cities.

Genocide and Population Control

Amerindians used to make up 100% of the Americas. Native Americans make up only about 2 percent of the U.S. population in 2014 and are projected to make up only 2.4 percent of of total U.S. population in 2060. –census.gov